When Competence Doesn't Feel Like Confidence

0:00You know you're good at this. Nobody in that room's questioning it, least of all the people paying you to be there. So why in the half second, before you speak, to some part of you still check? Why does a track record that nobody doubts? Do nothing to quiet the part of you that's re-reading your work that one more time? Why does proving it again never seem to be the thing that finally lets you rest inside it? You've probably called this imposter syndrome, but by the end of this episode you might be calling it something else. Let's talk about when competence doesn't feel like confidence. Welcome to Project Joyful, the podcast for Health-Scented Leaders. Project Joyful is a space for conversations at the intersection of leadership, health and lived experience. Here we explore what it means to lead in ways that honor your body, protect long-term capacity, and support a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

1:08This episode is part of the Biology of Leadership Series, and this series, we explore leadership through your body. Not as a performance to optimize or a mindset to fix, but as a biological experience straight down the sky. Leadership doesn't just live in decision strategy to roles. It lives in your nervous system, and how responsibility is held, and how reliability and care that quietly openize your body long before your consciousness is met. These conversations offer leaders who are capable, trusted and affected, and who are curious about how leadership is experienced internally, not just how it performs externally. There's nothing you need to do as you listen, no insight you need to apply. This looks simply an invitation to understand what's been shaping your experience of leadership beneath the service, and what's become possible when biology becomes part of the conversation.

2:11Let's begin, shall we? It's Monday morning, and you're walking into the same boardroom that you've walked into every month for the better part of, say, three years. Laptop under your arm, the quarters numbers already loaded and ready to go. You haven't looked at your notes since you wrote them, because, well, you don't need to. You sit down, you open the laptop, and somewhere in the half second, before you start talking, something in your chest. Not the numbers, the numbers are right, they're always right. That was never part of the question. Something further back than that, checking whether you're allowed to say it the way that you actually know it. You talk the room through the quarter, someone across the table asks a question, and you handle it. The kind of answer that gets the nod around the table, the kind that moves the meeting straight onto the next item.

3:14Out of you, under that table, your foot's tapping. Some part of you still turning the number over, checking the explanation that you gave again, even though you know it's right, even though it was right the first time you said it. Nobody in that room is wondering where there you've got this. Nobody has in years. You wouldn't be the one presenting the numbers if they didn't already know that you've got it. But there's a part of you that still hasn't got that memo. Let's say you finished that report at 6pm, the numbers touched twice already, the language exactly the way you want it. You go to hit send, but instead you scroll back to the top and you read it again. Start to finish. The way you'd read something that you weren't sure of, but you weren't unsure of it two minutes ago. So you close word and you open it straight back up and read it one more time before your finger finally lands on send. Well, maybe it's that project. It came through on Thursday afternoon. Your name already down as the lead. You've run something almost exactly like this twice before, and both times it went really well.

4:25But knowing that doesn't stop what's going on in your chest, the second you read that email. Tight, immediate, the kind of reaction you'd expect from something that you've never touched before. But you have touched this before. You know exactly how to do it. And still some part of you's already bracing like you don't. Maybe you get off a call 20 minutes later. And I went exactly the way these calls go when you're the one running them. Good questions, clear answers, the kind of thinking you twice before they hang up. You open your notebook anyway. You start writing down what you'd tighten the next time. The pace and the second half. The phrase you used instead of the better one that only occurred to you afterwards. But nobody on that course thinking about any of that. Just you three different moments, three different days. The same thing running quietly underneath every one of them, checking work that was never actually in question.

5:26So the interesting question was never whether you're competent because the evidence has already settled that in rooms exactly like the ones that you were just done. The real question is why your internal experience hasn't caught up. That's a different question to the one you usually asked about in pasta syndrome. Hey, the usual version assumes that if you found enough proof, said the achievement out loud long enough times. Keep the list of wins somewhere that you could see it. The feeling would eventually catch up. But it hasn't. And it's not because you haven't tried and not because the proof isn't good enough. It's because proof is never actually what confidence runs on. So competence lives in your explicit memory. The kind stored by your hippocampus. It's a record. Outcomes, decisions that how the call that went exactly the way you needed it to the project that landed. You can retrieve it. You can argue with it. You can hold it up as evidence because that's what explicit memory is built to do.

6:29But confidence is generated somewhere else entirely. The amygdala that sits deep in your limbic system, it runs a different older kind of memory, which is called implicit memory. Where the hippocampus stores what you know, the amygdala stores what once felt dangerous. And it stores it without language, without a timeline, without needing you to consciously remember the original moment at all. In fact, it keeps rewriting that moment every time you revisit that memory. And that's what makes it so hard to argue with. Now, you don't need to recall what originally wide getting this wrong is dangerous. Your body to still responders are fits true right now, whether it's in the ballroom, over an email on a call. The circuit fires whether or not the story behind it's available to you, which is why the tightness in your chest reading that email doesn't move when you remind yourself that you've done this twice before. The reminder is explicit. The tightness is implicit. Two different systems answering two different questions.

7:37And only one of them is listening to your record. And the imprint isn't the same for everyone because what it's protecting isn't the same for everyone. For one woman, it's the belief that being needed is the only thing that's keeping you safe. So competence has to be proven again every single time someone might need her. For another, it's maybe never having been allowed to ask a question twice. So every new ask becomes a test that she's not sure she's allowed to fail. For another, it's simpler and it's harder to name. It's just the old early sense that getting it wrong the first time cost more than you think it should have. Different imprint, same result. None of it's reading the record, but all of it's running anyway. So this was never a competence problem. Most of what gets called imposter syndrome starts from the opposite assumption that somewhere underneath the achievement there's a real question about whether you can actually do this.

8:39But what if that's not the question? What if what you have is a mismatch between two systems that were never wired to talk to each other automatically? And no amount of competence closes a gap that competence didn't create. Which is why that usual response doesn't work right? More preparation, rereading the report a fourth time, running the numbers again before you've said anything wrong. Doing more study, earning another qualification, doing that extra hour, building the case a little more solid than it needed to be. All of it's aimed at the explicit side, the record, the part of you that was never actually in question. None of it reaches the part that's running the response because that part was never reading the record to begin with. So you can hand you a meagdala, an unlimited amount of proof, and expect something to change because it has no mechanism for taking it in. It's not rejecting the evidence. It just doesn't have a door for that evidence to come in through.

9:43So it's not that you need to work harder to become someone that the doubt can't reach. There's no version of competent enough that reaches it. The tightness in your chest, the rereading, the bracing before something you've already proven you can do. That's your system doing exactly what it was built to do a long time ago. In conditions that had nothing to do with the boardroom that you're standing in now. And what holds regardless of which imprint is actually running it, whether it's the one that needs to be needed or proving itself fresh every time someone might come to lean on you. Or the one that never got to ask twice. So every question still lands like a test. Or it's that one that's harder to name, just the old early cost of getting something wrong the first time. All of these scenarios served to purpose, and that was to keep you safe. It's just still running that same petition in a life that doesn't require it anymore.

10:43So recalibrating it was never going to happen through argument because it was never installed through argument. It doesn't update because you won the case. It updates the way it was built through repetition, through direct felt evidence gathered slowly. That this specific room or this specific kind of moment doesn't cost what it used to cost. And that's not information. It's experience. So picture the same boardroom, another Monday, months from now. Same numbers loaded. The same room you've walked into more times than you can count. You sit down, you open the laptop. And this time there's no half second before you speak. Not because the materials any different, because the part of you that never got the memo has finally got it. You answer the question from across the table the same as you always do. But it gets the nod around the table the way it always does.

11:45But this time nothing is running underneath it. There's no foot tapping. There's no quiet second pass at a number that was already right the first time. Just the answer, landing, and you still in the room with it. Instead of three steps ahead checking whether it was really right. That shift doesn't happen because you finally gathered enough proof. It happens the way anything actually changes at that level. It happens at the speed at which you feel safe. The safer you feel the faster that change gets locked in. And then you repeat it until the system underneath stops bracing for it because it's become normal. So this is exactly the ground I'm opening up in a live executive briefing on the 15th of October. It's called when preparation isn't a problem. And we're going to look at why the most prepared, most proven people in the room can still be the ones quietly running this pattern.

12:45And why no amount of additional preparation was ever going to be the thing that resolved it. And what actually starts to shift it. It's free. It's live. And if you can't make it the recording comes to you. Details are at traceytatty.com forward slash preparation isn't the problem. I'm sending you lots of love. Bye for now. Hey thanks for listening to today's podcast. Can I ask you a favour? Tell conversations spoke to you today. But you please take a moment to leave a five star review. Your review will help people discover this podcast and together we can create a world where there's even more love and more laughter. And if you want to hear more from the project joyful podcast, just click the subscribe button. Bye for now.